Are you looking for a new social media strategy to get more customers? Of-course, that would be anybody’s objective, however many a social media strategy go awry, and the reasons are clear. Social media as we see it today is in a constant state of flux. And to get a comprehensive social media plan, that evolves with changing times; it requires a clear perspective of who the target customers are, what are the short term and long term goals and what competitors are doing good. But that does not end with creative updates, or releasing that one-off blog or a Facebook event and expect wonders. The right approach is to create a social media footprint that builds your brand reputation among existing clients as well as your target audiences. And believe me, creating the best social media strategy plan is no easy task, especially if you are building one from scratch.
Hence many businesses now prefer specialist teams to handle their social footprint. This saves invaluable management time on learning new techniques, testing new campaigns, evaluating audience insights for best results; as this time can be better used to focus on their core business functions. Plus with performance based marketing services, where you needn’t spend dollops of marketing dollars on retainer fees, you may well explore the possibility of hiring professional social media managers to help grow your business faster.
Broad Features Of A Smart
Social Media Strategy Plan
To grow the business using social networks, the strategy needs to take into consideration current competition activities, target audience behavioral trends, and the business goals. If the planning is specific, the results will be better, but how do you plan without social metrics? The idea is to take small steps, analyse whether the results are according to desired goals, take new initiatives, explore new creatives, re-measure and keep fine tuning the campaign till the best results are gained.
Here, hiring skilled social media consultants can help in the initial phase; though you may do-it-yourself by following these steps:
Find more statistics at Statista
A. Competitive Intelligence
As discussed earlier, an initial audit will help identify the right social media sites, groups, communities to target.
Find more statistics at Statista
B. Social Media Optimization
Once the plan is ready, it’s time to update, fine tune and optimize the social media accounts. Did you know, your social media accounts can be updated for SEO benefits that will further get your website more traffic? So it’s important to fill in all relevant fields, optimize the images, the text for the right search intent, and maybe integrate them with your website.
And then its time to get onto the content part. Here a good annual content calendar will get you the best results,
- Type of content: Images, info-graphics, blogs, videos, and so on
- Target audience: Profiling to reach the best potential segments
- Content frequency: How often will new content be posted?
- Promotion strategy: How will you promote the content?
C. ROI Driven Strategy
A way to start would be to look beyond the likes, retweets, shares into actual business goals, like leads generated, quantifiable actions taken, or new referrals gained.
For example, marketing on Linkedin, a good ROI goal would be to test response to posts,
+ Number of new connections / followers gained
+ Visitors to the website
+ Inquiries generated
Based on this initial data, the number of posts can be increased in a given period and now the test can be done for content type, timing of post, post engagement in relevant groups and other related activities.
Needless to mention, your social media marketing plan will constantly need to upgrade, evolve and grow as new networks take shape. There will be web engineering challenges on the way, and unexpected situations that you cannot plan in advance. But the main part of your campaigns will be the content that you generate, and how you can use the audience insights to improve performance.
The Parallel Program
We understand that many business like yours may find the effort to invest valuable management time on rolling out an integrated approach to social media communications, marketing and advertising; challenging. And we have designed a performance linked social media marketing program that works asynchronously, without interfering with your current processes and yet gives you quantifiable, actionable and measurable results.
Here you needn’t worry about increased budgets, escalating ad costs, content development, execution, supervision, and related challenges that you expect from any new program or system. And it is 100% white hat, legitimate marketing program where you pay only for the actual business results that you want.
Need to know more?
Contact us for details and an action plan for your business.
And you may like to join us on Linkedin at our newly formed “Customer BuildUp Strategies Group” to Ask & Answer & Participate in the discussions. Feel free to share your thoughts, your queries and your feedback with us.